commentary

Yesterday, Sang-Hyoun Pahk delivered a critique of the usage of the term augmented reality on this blog. First, thank you, criticism of this term is especially important for me (and others) because augmented reality is the fundamental unit of analysis about which I seek to describe. A quick catch-up: I initially laid out the idea of augmented reality here; expounded on its opposite, what I call digital dualism, here; and fellow Cyborgology editor PJ takes on the terms here. PJ Rey and I use the term augmented reality on this blog to describe the digital and physical worlds not as separate but instead as highly enmeshed together. And Sang is pushing us to further elaborate on what this all means.

I’ll tackle Sang’s second critique first because I think it is most important. The confusion comes from how two points hang together: (1) the digital and physical have enmeshed and (2) the digital and physical have important differences. Sang seems to be arguing that we cannot have it both ways, but I have and will continue maintain that we can.

Sang takes issue with PJ and I’s statements that the offline and online are mutually constitutive, which seems to “abolish the difference” between the two. I actually think we all agree here and perhaps PJ and I could have been clearer: the two are mutually constitutive, just not fully mutually constitutive. Let me offer new wording: atoms and bits have different properties, influence each other, and together create reality. more...

ok so i have a few complaints about the use of “augmented reality.” the first is primarily semantic. it seems (to me at least) like the term it implies some kind of (pre-digital?) “non-augmented” reality. this is more or less explicit when we refer to things like “augmented revolution” or “augmented conference.” it seems like the idea of augmented reality was introduced to make a point against a false binary (“digital dualism”) and i agree that this is important, both academically and in real life (see what i did there?). but i think the way we talk about augmented reality is sneaking a version of that binary back in. not the naive real v virtual but maybe something like real v “real+” and i think that is a mistake. and it is a strange mistake to read here, on a blog called “cyborgology” that proclaims (rightly i’m sure) that we have always been cyborgs. our friends from sst especially, i think, are sensitive to how reality has always been “augmented” if we are paying attention. more...

David Carr recently wrote a piece in the New York Times where he states,

Add one more achievement to the digital revolution: It has made it fashionable to be rude.

Has it?

The article is about how people are increasingly gazing into little glowing screens when in physical space. Carr views this as a “mass thumb-wrestling competition” where we are “desperately” staring at devices instead of making “actual” connections. And it is his usage of “actual” here that tips us off on why he has such a negative view of people looking at screens: he, like so many others, suffers from digital dualism. I’ve critiqued Amber Case, Jeff Jarvis and others on this blog for failing to make the conceptual leap that the digital sphere is not this separate space like The Matrix but instead that reality is augmented. I’ve been through the argument enough times on this blog that I’ll just refer you to the links and move ahead.

Carr’s digital dualism begins in his description of people looking at phones while at South By Southwest this past spring, something he then uses as evidence for the larger problem of increasing disconnectedness. He argues, more...

The 2012 presidential race is beginning to take shape, and it is interesting to see how social media is being differently used by candidates. Obama kicked off his re-election campaign on YouTube and is at Facebook today with Zuckerberg to do a Facebook-style town-hall Q&A. Mitt Romney (R-MA) annouced his presidential bid on Twitter and Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) announced on Facebook and even created a Foursquare-style gaming layer where supporters earn points for participating in his campaign. I’ll be analyzing how social media is used throughout the 2012 cycle, but I’d like to start all of this with the question: who will be our first social media president?

FDR became the radio president with his famous “fireside chats” and JFK the television president with his image-centered debates with Nixon. Many consider Obama the first social media president due to his massive fund raising and organizing efforts during the 2008 campaign using the web (though, Howard Dean was there four years earlier – remember his use of meetup.org). However, now that Obama has been in office for more than two years, has he really used the social web effectively in interesting new ways? The New York Times states that Obama treats the Internet like a “television without knobs,” using it primarily to simply upload videos for us to consume. Obama-as-president has thus far been a Web 1.0 leader instead of embracing the Web 2.0 ethic of users collaboratively and socially creating content.

To put it another way, go to Obama’s Twitter account and ask yourself if he is really using the medium in an effective way? It is clearly more...

I want to reflect on Theorizing the Web 2011 by asking for a discussion about what academic conferences should look like. In fact, let’s forget the term “conference” for a moment and ask how thinkers should best organize to discuss intellectual work in public?

Theorizing the Web 2011 was PJ Rey and I’s first attempt at tackling this question [read PJ’s review of the event here]. We started this blog to provide a public forum for ideas and the conference was intended to do the same. Many reviews of the event have emerged (some posted on this blog over the past ten days). What has surprised me most is the degree to which the conference itself has been a main topic of discussion. And while we are very proud that the reviews have been so overwhelmingly positive about our view of an academic event, we understand that this is also a result of the failing of traditional venues for the intellectual exchange of ideas. Academic conferences are too often suffered through and individual sessions often poorly attended. Media outlets tend to ignore anything that smells too much like intellectualism, a term itself that has come to be viewed pejoratively because, at least in part, intellectuals have so poorly communicated ideas to the public. As graduate students, we know we needed to create a world that is better prepared to communicate the critical theories so important to understand our changing realities.

And the result on April 9^th went well above our expectations.

We attempted to bring in art, multi-media, interdisciplinarity, and even non-disciplinarity to this event. Registration was pay-what-you-want. The event began with beers in an alley and finished with a loud band. We tried lots of things and will try much more if we do this again next year [we want to].The art was fun, and us organizers can take credit for that. more...

This past weekend Cyborgology editors PJ Rey and Nathan Jurgenson treated over two hundred (mostly) young academics to a new kind of conference. In some ways it was like any other conference: some people (me included) did the necessary grousing about waking up early; there were minor technical mangles [mangle of practice]; and there were some awkward glances at name tags as everyone tried to remember the names of their new professional acquaintances. But unlike some of the larger (dare I say, “mainstream”) conferences, there was a palpable sense of ownership over all aspects of the the project. We were doing this for a reason, and it was not to pad our CV’s. It was to play with the medium. We theorized the web, but in so doing, we also reconsidered the purpose of conferences.

more...

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of truth-seekers entreats Deep Thought, an artificially-intelligent supercomputer, to reveal the answer to the most elusive question in existence, “What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?”

Deep Thought takes up the challenge, but warns that it will require no less than seven and a half million years to produce the answer. Given the scope of the challenge, Deep Thought’s petitioners accept the computer’s terms and leave it to their descendants to benefit from Deep Thought’s protracted ruminations. Finally, following eons of cogitation, Deep Thought stirs and announces, ominously, that the long-awaited answer is ready–but Deep Thought adds that the answer is unlikely to be a crowd-pleaser. Their patience at an end, Deep Thought’s supplicants insist that the computer unveil the monumental secret that they have waited so long and faithfully to hear. At that, Deep Thought heaves an electronic sigh and pronounces that the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is…

…forty-two. more...

What is it that we exchange when we interact online? Part of my research into the notion of the branded cyborg explores the question of what we circulate in the networks that constitute digital sociality. Different platforms and communities within social media privilege different types of interactions, but two dominant  conceptualizations seem to emerge regularly. One is represented by Marcel Mauss‘ gift economy, the other by Bourdieu’s notions of capital, particularly social capital.

The concept of the gift economy resonates in the history of early web communities like CommuniTree (Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, 1995) and in the rise of Linux and the Open Source Movement. Mauss (The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, 1922/1990, p. 31) argued that gifts are never actually free, but objects of reciprocal exchange, and that “objects are never completely separated from the men [sic] who exchange them.” In a gift economy, then, objects cannot be fully transferred from one owner to another as they can in a commodity economy. Gregory’s (Gifts and commodities, 1982) work on Mauss suggests that the affiliation of the identity of the giver with the object is what compels reciprocation: gifts are inalienable, thus the act of giving creates debt that must be repaid and instantiates an ongoing relationship between individuals.  Gift exchange leads to a social bond and to mutual interdependence. more...

The Cyborgology editors are throwing a conference on April 9^th called Theorizing the Web. Leading up to the event, we will occasionally highlight some of the events taking place. I will be presiding over a paper session simply titled “Cyborgology” and present the four abstracts below. As readers of this blog already know, we view cyborgology as the intersection of technology and society. We define technology more broadly than just electronics, but also to things like architecture, language, even social norms. And the four papers on the Cyborgology panel offer a broad scope of what cyborgology is and how it can be used.

First, we have David Banks’ paper titled, “Practical Cyborg Theory: Discovering a Metric for the Emancipatory Potential of Technology.” David discusses what theoretical cyborgology is and what it can do. Bonnie Stewart offers a discussion of the social-media-using-cyborg as a sort-of “branded” self in her paper, “The Branded Self: Cyborg Subjectivity in Social Media.” Bonnie pays special attention to, in true cyborgology fashion, the way in which digital and physical selves interact and blur together. Next, Michael Schandorf argues that Twitter norms are akin to the non-speech gestures we make while talking (e.g., like moving our hands). What makes his paper, titled, “Mediated Gesture of The Distributed Body,” so appropriate for the Cyborgology panel is Michael’s focus on the physically and socially embodied nature of digital communication. Even digital communication does not exist alone in cyberspace but in an “augmented reality” at the intersection of atoms and bits. Last, Stephanie Laudone’s paper, “Digital Constructions of Sexuality,” empirically describes how sexuality is both affirmed and regulated on Facebook. This, again, highlights the embodied nature of Facebook while looking at how digital space operates differently than physical space.

Find the four abstracts below. Together, they will make for an exciting panel. We invite everyone to join us at the conference in College Park, MD (just outside of Washington, D.C.) on April 9^th. And let’s start the discussion before the conference in the comments section below. Thanks! more...

Given the recent events in the Middle East (and elsewhere, as protests continue in Wisconsin and ominous rumblings begin to issue from the direction of China) a great deal has been written in the past few weeks on the topic of social media and social movements/revolutions. Some of it has been a bit frothy, while much of it—including this, this, and this commentary on the Cyborgology blog—has been very insightful. However, while commentators have come at this issue from various angles, there hasn’t yet been much in the way of writing that seeks to wed an analysis of these forms of social action with existing theories of social movements and contentious politics.

The speed at which events have moved is a point on which a number of people have remarked. The wave of political anger expressed as protest that spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, and points beyond has been likened to dominoes falling—or, and this is more appropriate to the point I want to make, to the spread of a contagious disease. Democracy, it has been said, has “gone viral”. more...